Take My Place
by dictionaries-and-thesauruses
Summary: In the one moment between Sasha moving forward and the knife going in, Harry made a snap decision that changed the lives of everybody, especially his Ruth. Rated T for injury and character death. Spoilers for 10.6


There was no visible sun in the overcast sky - hidden behind a layer of grey cloud - but the shard of glass still glimmered. It threw dots of lights over the grass. Sasha's grip on it visibly tightened; it bit into his flesh but he didn't flinch.  
"Sasha, it was me," Ruth said, stepping forward, hand out like she was letting a dog sniff her. Harry threw her a look, which she pointedly ignored. "Your father asked me for the key. I gave it to him. Harry had nothing to do with it."  
"What?" A flash went across the Russian boy's face, confusion and anger in equal measure flaring in his eyes.  
"She's lying, Sasha, to protect me." It was Ruth's turn to throw Harry a look, and his turn to ignore it.  
"Sasha," Ruth started.  
"Why should I believe either of you?" he spat, his voice low and dangerous. "Both of you have lied to me." Ruth jumped at her chance.  
"I haven't, Sasha," she said, trying not to sound as desperate as she felt. "I haven't lied to you. I gave your father the key; I knew he'd kill your mother, but I didn't have a choice, Sasha. Hundreds of people would have died on that plane. Not just Brits, but Russians too."  
"You let him kill her." Sasha's voice was suddenly very quiet and cold. Icy anger gripped his face.  
"For the greater good, Sasha," Ruth said. "It was for the greater good." Harry moved as soon as Sasha did. He came between Ruth and the make-shift blade in one step. He didn't have time to plant both feet on the floor before his movement was cut short.  
"Harry!" He slipped on the grass and fell, half backwards half sideways. The glass glinted in the sun. Ruth reached out but his weight pulled at her hands. She only succeeded in slowing his fall enough to stop him cracking his head on the stone below him. Her knees hit the ground and she felt for the wound - somewhere far away she heard shouting and gunshots, but her world had narrowed to a coin-sized tunnel of vision. In that tunnel lay Harry and the ground immediately around him, a slice of cold, grey sky peaking in from above.  
She pulled on Harry's shirt and her fingers came away warm and bloody. The glass had sliced straight through the material, now stained red, and left a gash that ran right through him. As much as she pressed against it, applied pressure, blood still kept seeping through her fingers.  
"Harry!" Erin was beside her first, then Dmitri. He'd barely stopped before he bounded off again, disappearing from Ruth's tiny field of vision. She could only hope he was getting help - her ears were still ringing, her head pounding so much everything sounded low and distorted, like she was underwater.  
"Ruth, his lung's collapsing - keep him talking," Erin said, and sat by her side. Ruth looked at Harry. His face had gone pale, and red was slowly clawing it's way up the front of his shirt.  
"Ruth," Harry breathed, only half talking. She snapped out of her frozen state. "Tell me... tell me about your house."  
"No! Harry, tell me about..." She realised, very suddenly, she was struggling for a subject that he would talk about. She was massively short of options. She looked into his eyes and caved. "Okay. It's, it's got a green front door. All the paint's coming off, but, it's lovely Harry. And it's got two bedrooms. One's only small. It, I... I was thinking it could be your office."  
"My office?"  
"Yes." She squeezing his hand and trying to stop the bleeding, but she only had so many hands and she didn't want to give up on either. "I said I couldn't imagine myself living there, but... But I just couldn't imagine myself living there without you." He smiled at her, as much as he could. She tried to smile back, and she imagined they looked like mirror images with their sad, lopsided grins. "We'll live there, Harry. We will. Please... We can have a home, and a life, and all of the normal things we never got to. We can, we can have all of those normal things, Harry. We can have our lives. Our lives after now."  
He took a shudder-y breath and his chest rocked. Ruth kept his hand tightly gripped in her's and cried silently. She took her palm away from his chest to push hair out of her face and left a trail of blood on her cheek, before placing it back.  
"Ruth..." Harry trailed off and didn't finish his sentence. Ruth didn't move for a second, but Erin did.  
"He's arresting," she said. "Dmitri!"  
"There's no defib" he said, once he'd crashed to the ground beside them. "It'll have to be adrenaline."  
"His heart's stopped and he's not breathing. You have to go _now_!"  
Dmitri stabbed the adrenaline into Harry's chest and pressed the plunger. There was two second of solid, horrible silence, unbroken by the sound of a dying man coming back to life. Ruth stared down and didn't move, hand still wrapped around Harry's.  
"Do it again," she said, quietly.  
"Ruth," Erin started.  
"Do it again," she said, louder and clearer.  
"Ruth, I can't," Dmitri said. "There isn't anything left. There's no defib."  
"Well do something!" Dmitri sat back on his heals and breathed out. A ray of sunshine broke through the overcast sky and shone down on them, a huge natural spotlight. The glass winked at Ruth from the grass. It's blood stained edges made her sick to her stomach. The blood on her hands was cooling rapidly in the breeze, and Harry's body was doing the same.  
"Dmitri," Erin said, standing up. Dmitri followed without saying anything. They walked out across the grass, leaving Ruth in the mud.  
She didn't leave go of Harry's hand. She wiped her fingers on her clothes and closed his eyes, making sure not to leave blood on his eyelids. She leaned down and leant her face close to his. She kissed him, for one of the first times and certainly the last.  
Then, Ruth looked at the sky and shouted her heart out.


End file.
